The photoessay about Vitalis Staugaitis, a former deportee from Lithuania. This work is a part of the web series Traces: Traversing The Past produced together with the multimedia documentary agency Nanook.

The story

Vitalis Staugaitis (88) is a former deportee from Lithuania. At the end of the second week of the summer of 1941, Vitalis, who has just finished the fifth grade, his mother and two brothers were exiled from occupied Lithuania to the outskirts of the USSR. They were among other 17,500 Lithuanians deported just before the Second World War.

In Trofimovsk (Siberia), where he and his family were deported, Vitalis would experience as low temperatures as -55C and not see the sun for 71 days a year. The deportees would orientate according to the snow and the stars. Working people would get 400 grams of butter and 600 grams of sugar per month. The unemployed and the children would get half of that. Due to the lack of vitamins, a scurvy epidemic broke out. 'It would happen that you'd buy white bread, bite into it, and the piece would be covered in blood,’ remembers Vitalis.

During the first winter in Trofimovsk, one-third of deportees from Lithuania perished. Vitalis has managed to survive and face the De-Stalinisation. When the latter started, a part of the deportees went home. Then-thirty-years-old Vitalis soon joined them with his mother and two brothers.

However, even now the past did not disappear from his everyday life. Vitalis keeps drawing the scenes from the banishment, depicting people being transported by barges, and colouring the cemetery grey. Almost everything reminds him of Siberia, including a slice of rye bread and the sharpness of fresh snow. The old habits have not gone anywhere, either—instead of tea, Vitalis still sometimes drinks boiled hot water, just like he would in his long-gone youth. When asked whether he would want to forget his experiences, he responds silently: 'There is not a day when I don't remember the North. No, there hasn't been a day. I can't do it. It is impossible for me to do it.’

Disabled. This word often serves as a label marking a lot of different people. Perhaps, too different and diverse to be defined in one adjective. Therefore, in order to challenge this convention, the Swedish Institute and Lithuanian Forum on Disability organized an exhibition “AccessAbility”. The exhibition was opened on the European Independent Living Day, presenting portraits of people with disabilities exposing the difference between the concepts of disability and personality.